Jones Soda (JSDA)

Anybody in here follow Jones Soda(JSDA)? I have to do a study for a grad class in financial methods (for engineers, I'm not an accountant). Scouring over balance sheets and income statements, strategy, competition, etc and ultimately making a recommendation on the company (and the stock). I know they were flying high a few years ago, anybody know the story as to why they plummeted? Tried to be too big too fast? Obsessed with growth? I haven't had the time to really dig in...just curious if somebody around here was in the know.

I was going to pick SIRI but I'm too emotionally involved with this stock and with the merger, lack of easily comparable competition, the Liberty deal etc it was going to prove too much given the amount of time I have to work on the project.

I bought this stock about 8 months ago at its low after reading an article in Fortune, Small Business. If you could find the article, I am sure you would get all the answers you were looking for. From what I remember, there did grow to fast and had to cut everything back. I also think they got a new CEO.

I remember the hoopla to JSDA's run up was getting the product into Target - and the speculative mania was due to the success of HANS. Like SIRI a long time ago, once the speculation stage is over with, then comes the fundamental stage, and while I don't follow JSDA anymore, I bet their fundamentals didn't come thru, like SIRI's.

Ok - go to www.earnings.com and type in JSDA - they didn't have any EPS growth, here: match this data with a weekly chart:

Nov 7th 2007, they reported an EPS of -0.06, previous quarter it was 0.00, 2 before that it was 0.08 and before that it was 0.01. So they had an 800% increase in EPS, followed by going to flat, then going under.

Getting their product into Target wasn't enough - no one was drinking it. They likely failed to advertise like the other big soda guys do - HANS just caught on with the monster drink and was lucky it appealed to young guys without using TV commercials.

Remember stocks are bought/sold on: speculation, fundamentals or technicals, or mixes of each - but in the beginning the speculation stage can drive up price - the pump, but if the fundamentals don't follow, the technicals won't either. Right now JSDA has quarter after quarter of negative earnings, and its just a soda. Same thing with SIRI - you had a speculation phase but it hasn't earned a dime since its first report - not a single dime - so the stock price followed. It appears we are in a second speculation phase and things are turning around - but if it fails to earn a penny per share - don't expect it to be $30 like some folks think it should be. That requires fund managers to pick it up, and they won't until they see quarter after quarter of earnings growth.

Anyway - if you know more about SIRI - just pick out some of the bigger points about it, cause its going to take you more time to figure out what happened to JSDA.

thanks for the input guys. After reading a few articles I found out some of the story... They had kind of cult following and sold their products in glass bottles, had funky names for the drinks, and were doing well as a niche product. They got greedy, tried to be coke, switched to cans and got the product into target and starbucks and DID spend a ton of money on advertising. The problem was that none of the product sold and earnings turned upside down.

I think they are in a current movement back to being a niche product, but have still not turned around the earnings yet. They made a dumb move in a bad economy. The plus side is that they don't have any debt, but they are probably a year away from burning through all their cash.